IN MOSCOW ONCE
By J. R. GLORNEY BOLTON TWO sailors sauntered towards the Moskva. A girl watched them go by. Her yellow hair was closely cropped. Her eyes were luminous and grey. When the sailors were out of sight, she turned her face upwards to the sun and let its warmth embrace her. It was a symbolic action. Yesterday thousands upon thousands of soldiers, sailors and marines had tramped across the Red Square. Aeroplanes roared overhead. Stalin and the generals showed themselves to the people. Radio-sets were posted at street-corners, so that none could escape the spate of martial music and exhortations. Today the people wanted to
relax. Disciplined units were broken into young men who walked leisurely through the squares and pathways. They were not out- wardly communicative. The two sailors spoke not a word to each other. They gave no sign that they had seen the comely girl who sat alone in the sunlight. They went slowly down the path until they found an empty bench. They sat, and their faces were turned upwards to the sun.
Down the path came a matron. She wore a fur-coat and an array of wristbands and necklaces. She walked, looking neither to the left nor to the right, until she crossed the Moskva, and then she paused and leaned against the parapet. I think she did not notice that the features of the Kremlin, softened by many decades of wind and snow and rain, were mirrored in the water. I think she did not notice the elements at all. For it was clear that her temperament and blood were not those of a Slav people. Persecution, or the fear of persecution, had brought her to Moscow, and she was too old in years, too set in her habits, to accept the ways of another generation. Or was it in Moscow itself that she faced persecution and, in the impersonal ruthlessness of the revolution, the loss of one she loved? There was some- thing stronger even than the call of race which made her obtrude the little wealth she had in discordant finery.
I knew the Russian joy in the elements. Some days beforehand a pilot picked me up at Pahlevi, on the Caspian Sea. He was dour, suspicious, unfriendly. We flew low along the coast, and at every village there were people sitting in the sun, and they waved their welcomes as the shadow of the aeroplane swept near them. They were making a holiday of an anniversary of their Republic's incorporation in the Soviet Union, and I thought that the pilot did not want me to see them at play. He seemed to change his course, so that I could see the full reach of the oil- fields before he brought his aeroplane into Baku. He left the airfield without any salutation. A few hours later I strolled along the sea-front and joined a crowd of fair-skinned Caucasians, Persians and Mohammedan women fully veiled. A man sat on a bench with his wife and child. He saw me, and his stubborn
face was suddenly lit with a smile. The pilot was reconciled at last to his environment. It was a loitering crowd, content to stretch easy limbs in the sunlight. But the tempo changed when the sun went down. People filled the little cabarets and the clanging trams, and far into the night there was a confusing whirl of music and the high-pitched laughter of the young. To. morrow, in a few hours' time, would come the procession of workers to the oil-fields and the factories. It was the young and the eager who manned them.
And so I believed that I was travelling through a land fantastically rich in manhood. Day after day I saw the scattered villages in their sweep of meadows and cornfields, and the little communities gathered at the railway-stations to watch the big train furrowing its way to Moscow. Rostov and Kharkov, cities of smoke and steel, set the passengers talking of the greatest city they had ever seen. They were determined that I should be impressed. But Moscow, like Baku, was still on holiday. I had missed the parade in the Red Square and the elaborate speeches ; but I should see the citizens in repose. I could have wished for no better conclusion to my pilgrimage from India.
As a British Islander, I asked for a room in the best hotel, and when this was refused I raised my demand and asked for a bath. My insistence was eventually rewarded, and I was led to a chamber which had no furniture save a bath suspended on four uneven legs. I laid my clothes on the floor, where they remained quite "unharmed until I pulled out the plug. But they had already received more than one inundation in the mountain fords of Persia, and they would dry in the sun. I set off, un- comfortable and happy, for the Kremlin.
And here I was, outside the sandstone walls, regarding ordinary Soviet citizens : two sauntering sailors, a girl with luminous grey eyes, a woman hugging her fur-coat, though the long winter was over and the earth pulsated with life. The Soviet had made May Day a festival of its own, but where a hibernating people wait for the first flush of summer, the early days of May stir and freshen the blood. In Baku and Moscow the sun-worship was a natural worship. For worship with the Russian is instinctive. In no other city—in that spiritually distant year, 193o—could you have seen crude cartoons of Pope Pius the Eleventh displayed within a few yards of a church, where, at the open door, old men stood to recite their litanies. In no other city would you have seen an unfinished, but magnificent, tomb rising from the chief square to house the embalmed corpse of a revolutionary leader. Nature is terrible and kind, and, unlike the other cities of the world, Moscow makes no attempt to escape from Nature. It retains the smell of the soil, and the blizzards and the sun are great realities.
Napoleon drove into the Kremlin exhausted and uneasy. The streets were almost empty, and, unlike Vienna or Berlin, Moscow had few dignitaries hurrying to pay their homage. They were obviously slow to acknowledge that the conqueror's arrival at the Kremlin meant the end of their country's resistance. Then Napoleon saw the fires assail the wooden houses and lighted beams hurtle through the air. The ruler of Paris might govern France, but, in 1812, the spirit of Russia governed Moscow and made its consuming flames a beacon of hope to the stricken Continent. People who wrestled with the elements and with the forest fires had no overwhelming fear of a charred city, or a scorching of the rejuvenating soil.
I wanted to sense, if I could, the milieu of Moscow, com- munistic and burdened with history, before the round of visits to offices and factories, the tiresome concession to. left-wing orthodoxy and the Five Years' Plan was due to begin. I also wanted, as a British Islander, to do the correct thing, and knocked boldly at a large door. I was rather at a loss in addressing the man who stood before me in strictly conventional attire, and whose face registered as much amusement as his aloof station in life would permit. After an absence of nearly three years from Europe, it was hard to realise that the Embassy door would be opened by an English butler. Extra-territorial status was never more delicately or more firmly poised.
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